Calgar's Siege

by Paul Kearney

  But all that was as nothing now, compared to the prospect of the assault that was rolling towards them over the broken muck of the plain north of the Dromion River. The attacking forces extended for fully two miles, a beetling mass of orks whose roaring gabble could be heard now from the walls of the city.

  He heard a new noise also: the whistling swoop of shells. The flash of the guns could just be made out in the distance through the drizzling rain, minute twinkles of fire.

  ‘Incoming,’ he said.

  ‘They are overshooting, as usual,’ Marneus Calgar said beside him. ‘One can count on the orks for many things, and inaccuracy is usually one of them.’

  ‘Sir, Governor Fennick reports heavy barrage striking the Alphon Spire,’ Lieutenant Pherias said, reading off the vox-feed.

  Calgar was also monitoring the feed in his helm readout. He keyed up Janus’ rune.

  ‘Lieutenant, mount up the firefighters and move closer to the southern wall. Be prepared to move out of reserve on my word.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘The Russes are firing,’ Boros said. Even at this distance, he could make them out, towering over the ork infantry. They were Imperial tanks, looted from some captured depot and customised after the ork fashion, splashed with garish paint, with silhouettes all wrong due to ork modifications. But the Russ was a good weapon. It could take a lot of punishment.

  ‘Shall I engage at extreme range?’ he asked Calgar.

  ‘No, colonel. Wait for my word. No one is to open up until they hear my command. We cannot afford speculative fire – we do not possess the ammunition.’

  Ammunition. If they saw off this attack, then they would have exhausted most of the reserves. Boros knew that, but it was a detached piece of information that seemed to have little relevance now. All that mattered was the advancing horde.

  ‘Ork aircraft inbound,’ Lieutenant Pherias said. At least twenty-five craft, nine miles out and closing fast.’

  ‘Seal blast doors,’ Boros said, and a few seconds later the yellow warning lights whirled and flashed as the massive strike-proof doors of the bunker began to grind closed. It seemed to grow hotter almost at once. He looked up and down the dim confines of the casemates and saw the weapons crews peering out with sweat pouring down their faces, cutting lines in the grime.

  Over two hundred men in the bunker, all of them adding their own heat and stink to the miasma, and below them the other levels of the Vanaheim were similarly packed with frightened, unwashed soldiers, most of whom had been mere anonymous civilians until a few weeks ago.

  They would fight. They had no choice. The Vanaheim was sealed now, with nowhere to run to.

  The Hydra batteries next to them on the roof opened up, a sharp tearing clatter of automatic fire that could be felt as a vibration in the heavy air.

  ‘Beta Primaris, are you ready?’ Calgar asked.

  The Basilisk battery based down in the suburbs came back at once. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘All tubes, hold fire until my signal, and fire only upon prearranged coordinates. Not a round must go to waste.’

  A home for every bullet. Calgar looked at Mathias, who was standing close by. The Chaplain’s skull-helm nodded slightly.

  ‘The Leman Russes are opening up. They’re making heavy going of the ground,’ Boros said.

  Now the flash of the tanks’ firing could be seen. Some were drawing ahead of the line; others seemed to be bogged down. When this happened, a huge mob of orks would grapple with the massive machine and shunt it bodily through the mire. Nothing brought home the brute physicality of the orks more than watching them manhandle fifty-ton tanks.

  ‘One and a half miles,’ Boros said, reading off the auspex. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes, but it kept dripping from his face onto the device like warm rain.

  Calgar moved forward – he had been immobile all this time – and his battered wreath-crested helm turned this way and that. The fingers flexed at the end of the great power fists he wore as he bent and stared intently at the approaching enemy.

  Above them, the first bombs went off, and they heard the screech of the ork fighter-bombers as they swooped through a cloud of anti-aircraft fire.

  The heat and noise in the bunker was almost unendurable, but what was outside was worse. They felt the plascrete under their feet quiver as ordnance impacted on the summit of the Vanaheim, and there was one particularly savage boom which made the bunker shudder and sent little streams of dust sifting down from the ceiling.

  ‘First wave has passed over. Another enemy flight inbound in forty seconds,’ Lieutenant Pherias said in a harsh croak.

  ‘Two Hydras destroyed,’ another officer said. ‘They’re really pasting us.’

  ‘They’re in range!’ Boros said, banging his fist against the bunker viewslit.

  ‘Hold your fire,’ Calgar told him calmly.

  They rode out the storm, and the one that followed it. The men in the bunker ducked instinctively as bombs impacted on the roof above. The vox was a tattered mayhem of competing voices.

  Boros studied what pict-feed survived, scanning the northern picters. Alphon Spire had been hit heavily and was burning in half a dozen places. The sky was alive with explosions and clouds of anti-aircraft fire, and ork artillery was impacting in the suburbs, flattening whole city blocks.

  ‘My lord, surely–’

  ‘Hold your fire,’ Calgar said, and his suit amplified the command so that it rang out sonorously through the bunker.

  Lieutenant Pherias rubbed dust out of his eyes. A shard of plascrete had opened up his temple and the blood was flowing down it in a bright stream, but he seemed unaware of the wound.

  ‘Fifteen hundred yards,’ he said.

  The big Leman Russes were still lurching forward, firing as they came. Three had been left behind by the advance, either bogged down or broken down, but at least a dozen were still advancing on the walls on a frontage of almost a mile or so, headed straight for the tall gates within the Vanaheim.

  Around them massed a huge formation of ork infantry, at least ten thousand roaring forward on that frontage alone, and in the midst of that packed murderous mob there stalked taller machines, bipedal, angular and with heavy weapons and pincers for arms. Scarlet banners flew from their backs.

  ‘They have Dreadnoughts,’ Boros said. ‘I count… Damn it, I can’t see.’ He wiped his face free of muck and grime.

  Calgar straightened.

  ‘Beta Primaris, targets in the open, grid omega one zero. Fire for effect.’ Then he raised his voice.

  ‘Pick your targets, left to right. Aim for the tracks with your first round, then the hulls. Tanks first, Dreadnoughts later.’ He paused, and the command roared out of his suit speakers.

  ‘Open fire!’

  Sixteen

  ‘They are fighting at Zalathras. I can sense it,’ Brother Valerian said. He clamped his mouth in a thin line, his flesh a pale preternatural colour in the light of his psychic hood.

  ‘I take it you are like our Jodi then,’ Ghent Morcault said. ‘These things just seem to come up on your own personal augur.’

  The Librarian looked at him through unsettling dark eyes, the black in them flecks that peered into some unknowable dimension of hell.

  ‘My calling. My purpose is to sense such things, to fight against the ruinous powers and all their minions. To aid my brothers in any way possible. And right now, my brethren have need of me, and I am far away.’

  ‘Your own Chapter Master sent you on this mission. He must have had a good reason. From what I’ve seen of him, Marneus Calgar is not subject to whim.’

  They were on the bridge of the Mayfly, and the ship was as calm and dead as a tombstone in a cemetery. They had landed an hour ago, brought down by the storm and the passing swathes of ork attack craft that infested Zalidar’s lower atmosphere. Now the ship sat bat
tered by the rain on a rocky shelf amid the Morcault Mountains, over six hundred miles from Zalathras. And yet Brother Valerian seemed to know at least some of what was currently going on in that beleaguered city, despite the fact that they were off vox, every frequency shut down for fear it would give away their position to the enemy.

  Hester sat at her station, studying the augur relays, while Jodi Arnhal sat beside her at the Navigation console, the chair skewed round so that he could face the Space Marine Librarian. He was studying his fellow psyker with a mixture of awe and yearning.

  ‘The Lord of Macragge sent me on this mission to get me away from the psychic turbulence which surrounds Zalathras,’ Valerian said. ‘But here we are far from its walls, and still I find around me the baying fog of the ork psyche. It is as though the very planet itself has become one with it. It happens sometimes, when the orks come upon worlds such as these in great numbers.’

  ‘Worlds such as these?’ Morcault asked, puzzled.

  ‘Jungle planets, thriving with life. It is my theory that the ork was first engineered into being on such a planet, perhaps even using the genes of an indigenous species as a template. The ancient forces which could work such wonders are long gone, but the ork remains, like the cockroach after the bomb has gone off.

  ‘In any case, Zalidar suits this particular strain of xenos as the ocean suits the fish. This world, Morcault, will never be what it was, even if we prevail here. The taint of the ork is not as sinister as that of Chaos, but it is almost ineradicable, once introduced to a world like Zalidar. The jungles nurture it, conceal it and help it breed. Zalidar will never again be free of it.’

  Morcault looked tired and beaten by the Librarian’s words, an old man with not much road left in him. It was Hester who spoke up.

  ‘This is our world. If we have to fight to keep it, we will.’

  Valerian smiled. ‘I applaud your determination. Let us hope we are equal to the test that has been set us here.’

  The bridge doors opened and Proxis marched in. Rainwater was dripping in streams from his armour and he had unhelmed; it shone in the stubble of his scalp.

  ‘How much longer, shipmaster? We have an errand to run, and little time to run it. The weather worsens outside.’

  ‘Hester?’ Morcault asked.

  The pilot consulted her slates. ‘There is still a patrol some nine miles north of us. If we took off now they’d be all over us like fleas on a dog.’

  Proxis’ face gnarled with anger. ‘They are counting on us in Zalathras. My lord is waiting. I trust you have no aversion to risk.’

  ‘If we had, we would not have plucked you and your lord out of the jungle,’ Hester snapped, though she did not look up at the towering Space Marine.

  Proxis cocked his head to one side. He shared a look with Valerian, and something like a smile flitted across his face. ‘I take your point,’ he said.

  ‘Hester is the best pilot in the system. When she says we can make it through, we will take off,’ Morcault said to Proxis. ‘Better we are delayed than destroyed.’

  ‘Very well,’ the Ancient replied in a quieter tone. ‘But do not tell me better late than never. In my experience, arriving late is often the same as never arriving at all.’

  It was three hours before the ork aerial patrols thinned enough to let the Mayfly take off and launch itself northwards again. The ship had come in a great loop to the south, clear down to the mountains – forced far off its course by the proximity of many ork fighters and transports. Now they had to approach the Ballansyr Quarries from the south, Hester bringing the little freighter skimming low over the Tagus and using all her skill to contour the ground in a craft which had never been built for atmospheric manoeuvres.

  The storm had moved north, and they were trailing in its wake, the black mass of it darkening the world in front of the viewports, underlit by concatenations of lightning and the silver sheet of torrential rain. It cleared the way for them, a piece of luck which even Proxis had to grudgingly acknowledge, and Hester lifted the ship slightly, approaching the quarries from an altitude of six thousand feet – which for a star-going vessel was within spitting distance of the ground.

  They saw the Ballansyr region grow under them like a vast scar carved through the jungle, an open ochre wound in the green flesh of the world. Stretching for perhaps twelve square miles, the works laid bare the bones of Zalidar in a series of interconnected excavations, massive deep-delved hollows a mile to a side with roadways spiralling down into them and clusters of buildings dotted here and there. Some of the quarries had become lakes, grey as gunmetal under the overcast sky. Others seemed almost bottomless, mere dark holes reaching into the bedrock of the planet.

  ‘Behold the world as Kurt Vanaheim would make it,’ Morcault said grimly. ‘The greedy bastard.’

  Proxis stared intently out of the viewscreens. ‘Brother,’ he asked Valerian, ‘what do you make of it?’

  The Librarian stood with his eyes closed, the cerulean blue of his hood quivering and a kind of hum in the air about his head.

  ‘The orks have been here. Are still here. But not in huge numbers. I do not sense any direction to them. They may be deserters or stragglers, or merely those left behind to pick over the bones.’

  Proxis’ eyes narrowed. ‘You know the coordinates,’ he said to Hester. ‘Set us down but keep the engines going. I shall take my brethren out first, and then the militia and the vehicles will follow if all is clear. Brother, let us go and get the thing done.’

  He snapped his helm onto his head, and the two Adeptus Astartes left the bridge.

  ‘Charming fellow,’ Hester muttered, playing on the controls with taps as swift and delicate as the footfalls of a dancer.

  ‘He has seen centuries of atrocity,’ Morcault told her. ‘I wonder only that he has any humanity left to him at all.’

  Proxis led his brethren out of the Mayfly at a run, the Space Marines jumping from the ramp while it was still ten feet in the air. The six Ultramarines dashed for the buildings to their front, and the cavernous entrance to the mine that loomed up black behind. Even as they advanced, a clot of small ork creatures came piling out of the shacks around the mine entrance, shrieking shrilly and snapping off wild lasgun fire. Brother Kadare opened up with the heavy bolter and blew them away.

  The ringing echoes of the bolter fire died away. The rain pattered down, a steady drizzle that slicked the Ultramarine armour and striped the dust and filth on it.

  ‘Spread out, by twos,’ Proxis said. ‘Brother Kadare, with me. Brother Valerian, you take the right.’

  Valerian walked out in front. He raised one hand at the huge mine entrance. ‘Something in there, Proxis.’

  The Ancient consulted the map on his heads-up display. ‘Well, that’s where we are going, brother. Five hundred yards in there is a shaft to the left, and down it are the stores we are here for.’

  The Ultramarines went through the buildings one by one, kicking in the doors and nosing their bolters into every room. Nothing but the trash the orks had left behind.

  ‘All clear,’ Proxis said. He changed frequency.

  ‘Militia, on me. Bring the vehicles. Morcault, keep an eye on the augur. If anything appears here, try to let us know. If it is in strength, take off and circle.’

  ‘I hear you,’ Morcault’s old voice came back. ‘Be aware the mine has been deserted for some time. The rain may well have destabilised the supports closest to the entrance.’

  Proxis did not reply. Glancing at the chrono running in his helm display he saw that they were seven hours behind schedule. He felt momentarily tempted to call up Zalathras on the vox, but that would give away their position. He said a silent prayer, watchful.

  ‘Brother Valerian, do not forget the other reason you are here.’

  The Librarian nodded, frowning.

  From the hold of the Mayfly rumbled two large six
-wheeled heavy loaders. Equipped with hydraulic cranes and massive flatbeds, their original bright yellow had been hurriedly sprayed dark green. The barking engines seemed very loud to Proxis. Both vehicles were crammed with militia, hanging off the sides and packed into the cabs. In front of them walked the militia officer, Lascelle.

  ‘Nice day for a drive,’ Lascelle drawled, but his quick alertness did not match his tone. He carried a beautifully tooled bolter, a scaled-down version similar to those the Ultramarines carried. It looked old enough to be an heirloom. He scanned the surrounding cliffs that frowned over the quarry, rain running in rivulets down them. The earth here was not the dark clay of the jungle, but a paler, lighter material, and when wet it balled up quickly under the boot.

  ‘Debus your men,’ Proxis told him. ‘One hit on a loader could take out half of them. We go in on foot, staggered file, vehicles at the rear – no one in them but the drivers. Clear?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Lascelle said, chastened. He shouted an order and the men leapt off the two loaders into the mustard-coloured muck.

  ‘Brother Antigonus, lead off,’ Proxis said.

  The company began trooping forward into the darkness of the mine.

  It was eerily quiet when they had gone in a hundred yards or so. There was no power here, so they turned on the lights of the loaders for the sake of the militia, and two men worked the searchlights on the roof of the cabs. The sound of the rain died away as they ventured into the dark, and there was only the dull thump of their feet, the murmuring engines and the steady drip of water from above.

  ‘Tracks in the dirt,’ Brother Antigonus said. ‘Orks, big and small, vehicles.’

  ‘Let us hope they have not found this store we are looking for,’ Proxis said. ‘I should hate to have come all this way for nothing.’

  The auspex was clear. Brother Valerian studied it constantly as they advanced, sweeping the tunnel for five hundred yards in front. But the Librarian felt a tingling in the corners of his brain. They were not alone down here, of that he had no doubt.